In spite of the location footage, and its mostly African setting, the film enacts a struggle over British identity. It uses Africa chiefly as setting for a battle played out between an old Britain and a newer one, between traditional reserve and sexual licence, between military disciplines and commercial imperatives. Set on the Gold Coast, it brings together elements of documentary realism and filmed theatre, and generically it moves between old-fashioned whodunnit, lively comedy and tragic melodrama. Its sometimes exhilarating stylistic variety is part of a wider ambivalence about modernity and tradition, and about the decencies and corruptions of British colonialism.

The censor at first opposed the project on the grounds that it showed British officers ‘in a most offensive and objectionable light’ as murderers, blackmailers and gamblers (cited in Thorold Dickinson: The Man and His Films, 44). The story entertains the idea that its hero, Major-General Sangye, has murdered his blackmailer and framed an innocent man – and it encourages us, in the regular process of a whodunnit, to imagine the possibility of this criminality and corruption in high places.  So far, so ‘offensive and objectionable’. But the unfolding plot takes a very different turn.  Sangye is vindicated, he emerges as a nobly self-sacrificing father, and is allowed the directing hand in the denouement by which the real villain is unmasked. However, he has to pay for his compromised past by his own death, an atonement that symbolically suggests a reckoning with what was shady in the British military and colonial past.  But The High Command gives us only a partial and forgiving version of colonial wrongdoing. There may be patriarchal skeletons in the closet, the story suggests, but they are not matter for real moral disgrace; and the ruling classes can be left to police themselves. The blackmail relates to affairs of the heart fifteen years earlier, not to things as they now are, so there is no social urgency to the revelation of his crime of honour.

The colonial presence is not a homogeneous or harmonious one in this film, with the General standing on the side of military tradition, and the odious factory-owning Martin Cloam (‘a common trader’, according to Sangye) representing the newer power of trade and commerce.Cloam is British in the original story, but becomes foreign in the screen treatment – just as the tyrannical husband would do three years later in Dickinson’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s Gaslight. He and his wife (played by Hungarian and German actors) have strong central European accents, which makes this a story about European Africa as well as British Africa (it seldom attempts to be a film about the Africa of its original inhabitants).  This triangulation is instrumental in keeping the film thematically interested in the idea of the imperial British under threat away from ‘home’ – at first in the vivid prologue set in Ireland 1921, then in the main plot in West Africa. Its  interest seems to lie in the psychology of a nation under attack rather than in the corruptions of authority exerted.  The British stronghold in The High Command is a military fort, stationed on an island, therefore doubly separated from the mainland by walls and water. Cloam sailing by night to the fort is filmed as if he were Dracula, creeping in at the unsecured casement. It works as a spatially eloquent image of British vulnerability in this period of imperial fragility and diminution, and perhaps the sense of threat – and its characterisation as European – belong to the 1930s moment as much as to the apparent setting.

Graham Greene’s review of the film astutely hailed Thorold Dickinson as an important new director, and singled out one of its scenes:

‘What will remain longest in my memory is the little scene in the Club when the band breaks into ‘God Save The King’ for the Governor, just as the evening wind begins to blow: the black servants start towards the flapping shutters and banging doors and then, seeing the rigidity of their masters, leap to attention while the tune penetrates fitfully through the din of the Hammatan: ‘happy and glorious’, the potted palms bend towards the floor, the great green lights swing above the billiard-table, ‘long to reign over us’, the wind smashes through the clubroom and British West Africa comes alive as it never did in Mr Korda’s lavish and unimaginative Sanders of the River.’

This scene which Greene describes is also a virtuoso sonic composition, working in a confident experimental spirit with the new possibilities of sound film.  The film’s technique here seems to be on the side of these winds of change blowing through the colonial club.

Peter Swaab (2010)